Video: Company Overview

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When Stone Source was founded, it was founded with the idea of architects and designers in mind.

I’m Joe MacIsaac - the President & CEO of Stone Source.

The architectural sale is when architects specify materials in the beginning of the construction process. To include natural stone and porcelain tile in this process was really new in 1986.

It really created a unique niche for Stone Source.

To help the architect select the right material by having something that typically happened at the end of the construction process and moving it to the beginning of the process was the real unique change for Stone Source.

It’s hard to be good in this business. There’s a lot of variability. We want each material we buy to be the best representation of that natural material. And that’s really hard to do. It’s a challenge every time we buy. Are we buying the best that’s available? Sometimes the answer is, we’re not going to buy it because it doesn’t meet our standards. We’re curators.

I’m a firm believer that all showrooms should have a story. You should be able to - in 5 or 10 minutes - tell the story of your company, of your product, and how you interact with your potential customer in the showroom.

If you think “what is the source?”, the source is not only the mountain but it’s also the inspiration. We wanted people to walk in and feel something similar to what those of us feel when we actually go into a quarry or in a stone yard. And we wanted to make sure that there was a connection between nature and our finished product that we’re selling, which is oftentimes very much improved and geometric and I think that the showrooms help to tell that story. Rather than show pretty pictures and images of installations – which we have a lot of – we also thought it was very important that we educated people to the degree that they were interested. We thought that it would be very important that our sales reps, who carry around this education in their heads, would have the opportunity to convey this when they’re one on one with you. You could get that education from the website, sitting at home at your kitchen table if you chose. So the Care and Maintenance Guide and the Usage Guide, we thought were very important to include.

If we do our job there and then we do our job in purchasing the best representation of these different materials, we have a really good opportunity to delight the customer. And that’s our goal, to make sure they’ve been educated by us - in part - so that when they’ve made the decision, the product is installed and it’s performing the way it’s supposed to, they got exactly what they wanted.